Damn, they nailed that cover. Wiz adorns Complex’s October/November 2012 issue and the accompanying feature focuses on the balancing act he performs everday as a newly minted superstar trying to maintain and nurture the base he built as an indie artist.

Just how much does Wiz love Amber? He doesn’t even peep cell phone pictures of groupies. “Groupies? I don’t do that,” he says with disdain. “My girl said to me, ‘Baby, these bitches don’t even deserve to breathe your air.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? You right.’” Call it another sort of balancing act.

What does command Wiz’s full attention is his upcoming album. He and everyone in his camp feel confident about O.N.I.F.C.—everyone, apparently, except for Atlantic Records.

“Atlantic likes O.N.I.F.C.,” says Wiz. “But they want more obvious singles because that’s what sells it for them. My belief in the record is what sells it to me. It’s not a conflict. You just have to communicate so everybody understands it.”

Whatever you do, don’t let those clowns strongarm you into another Rolling Papers brother. Read Insanul Ahmed’s full cover story and check out a gallery by Bryce Duffy here.

Rolling a joint filled with his own strain of weed—dubbed Khalifa Kush—Wiz explains the difference. “Kush & Orange Juice is a classic mixtape, but it’s still a mixtape,” he says. “That mixtape is raw. I did what I wanted to do. You can’t do that on an album because other people gotta eat off that album. There’s business that goes into an album. When you do an album, you can’t separate the music from the business because it’s music business.”

“He helped me stay out of the way of a lot of bullshit because he’s seen so much,” says Wiz of Spitta, who languished on No Limit and Cash Money before cultivating a buzz independently and signing with Warner. “He helped me with marketing and branding when we were coming up. Where I was confused, he had the answer. When he was confused, I had the answer. Curren$y helped me way more than I helped him.”

We’re going to do O.N.I.F.C. exactly how I want to do it to see how that works. It can’t be one-sided.

“We’re like Ryu and Ken,” adds Curren$y, who remembers the days of going half on Chinese food plates with Wiz while recording their collaborative mixtape, How Fly. “Ken had the uppercut with all the fire and shit. Ryu had a more controlled uppercut, but he’s the one that showed Ken the uppercut.”

Curren$y cautions that Wiz’s level of success isn’t for everyone. “He’s like fucking Puff Daddy right now,” says Spitta. “People be like, ‘You should be right there with your brother.’ But I’d rather lay low and kick it. It’s super awesome to be Puff Daddy but it’s a gift and a curse.”